Across the country, cubicle walls are coming down as businesses seek to take advantage of the cost-saving benefits associated with open-plan offices. While employees have been very vocal in their collective disdain for the latest workplace trend, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon. In fact, more than 75 percent of U.S. offices now feature an open plan, according to research by Milwaukee design firm Kahler Slater, which means many Americans have no choice but to learn to work in this new environment.

Employees aren’t the only ones complaining about this new layout, however. These new plans leave computer monitors unguarded, which is good for bosses who want to make sure employees aren’t spending all day on Facebook. It isn’t so good for enterprise data security, since screens are now easily accessible to fellow employees and workplace visitors.

Visual hacking

Businesses spend a great deal of time and resources on ensuring their servers are secure without realizing their employees pose the biggest threat. Visual hacking occurs when a party is able to gain access to a user’s screen in person. The person doesn’t even have to be standing in a user’s office to see the information. It could be viewed through a window, from a hallway, or on a user’s laptop screen while working at a coffee shop.

An open-plan office presents a new challenge for employers, since the cubicle walls that once protected computer monitors are gone. In many cases, monitors can’t be positioned in a way that protects the information displayed on them from being viewed. Businesses should investigate and purchase top-quality privacy filters for their office desktops and laptops and position each monitor in a way that minimizes views.

Password theft

For years, employees have gotten in the habit of posting passwords around their offices on sticky notes. In an open-plan office, even keeping this type of information under a keyboard or in a desk drawer can be dangerous. Those nearby could witness this behavior and wait until an opportune moment to access it.

Another danger in open-plan offices is that someone nearby will simply watch a person’s keystrokes to note his password. This is especially true of a system’s primary password, which a user generally enters every time he returns to his computer. Employees should be advised to be aware of those around them and refrain from entering passwords if someone’s watching.

Individual privacy

While cubicle walls were always insufficient in shielding workers from each other’s phone conversations and in-office meetings, an open-plan office packs more workers into a smaller amount of space. This puts each conversation within earshot of at least a dozen people. Employees can easily overhear information that should have been kept private, whether that information belongs to a customer or co-worker.

To offset this risk, businesses should group employees together in a way that makes sense. A call center group that deals with customer payments could be situated toward the back of the office, with each employee understanding that anything they overhear is to be kept confidential. Many employers are also opting to include private areas for employees to have private conversations. Be sure these small offices include an office phone and make sure calls can be forwarded to that number if an employee finds confidential information must be discussed mid-call.

Property theft

While offices have made great strides toward becoming completely digital, paper is still a large part of daily corporate life. An employee may deal with contracts, meeting notes, and other confidential information on paper, resulting in stacks of documents and file folders. In a closed office, this isn’t as much of a problem, since walls shield information throughout the day. In an open-plan office, however, it can invite theft.

In addition to putting documents at risk, an open-plan office can invite theft of personal property, including employee purses and wallets. To protect an employee’s personal belongings, lockable drawers should be available in each office. If an employee deals with documents that contain sensitive information, employers should mandate that those documents be stored safely away in a locked file cabinet when not supervised. If possible, consider switching to a document management system that allows these documents to be safely stored on a server, with all paperwork shredded once stored.

Open-plan offices have upped the risks for many businesses, but with a few security precautions, companies can mitigate risks. Employees should be trained in IT security for this new office environment to prevent putting customer and personal information at risk.

Wednesday, Feb 26, 2014

Thursday, Apr 10, 2014

ARTICLE: The past few days have been choc-a-block with discussions of Heartbleed–what it is and how it works, and what the average user should do about it. (For the former, here is a particularly understandable explanation. The answer to the latter: wait until sites are fixed, and THEN change your password. If it’s a high-value site, changing your password before the patch has been installed and a new key/certificate has been generated is counterproductive, as it may make your new password more vulnerable rather than less. Ed Felten provides good advice both for the average user and for website operators on what they should do.

Friday, Sep 5, 2014

Friday, Feb 6, 2015

VIDEO: Guest editor Alf Weaver interviews Jingquan Li about his article "Ensuring Privacy in a Personal Health Record System" and balancing personalization, privacy, and security, from Computer's February 2015 issue on Computing in Healthcare.

Monday, Feb 9, 2015

VIDEO: Author Brian M. Gaff provides an audio recording of his Computing and the Law column, in which he discusses how bring your own device (BYOD) allows employees to bring personally owned technology to their workplaces and use it in connection with their jobs.

Thursday, Feb 12, 2015

ARTICLE: Across the country, cubicle walls are coming down as businesses seek to take advantage of the cost-saving benefits associated with open-plan offices. While employees have been very vocal in their collective disdain for the latest workplace trend, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon. In fact, more than 75 percent of U.S. offices now feature an open plan, according to research by Milwaukee design firm Kahler Slater, which means many Americans have no choice but to learn to work in this new environment.

Tuesday, Mar 24, 2015

Monday, Apr 6, 2015

VIDEO: In "Accidents Will Happen," Grier discusses self-driving cars, automotive information systems, and their tremendous security risks--illustrating how we tend to think about functionality first and consider security problems only as an afterthought.

Wednesday, Apr 1, 2015

ARTICLE: Cybersecurity is essential for business owners in 2015. There have been numerous security breaches of major companies just in the last few months, including Anthem Insurance Agency, Sony, and Target.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

ARTICLE: Launched a year ago, Code Hunt is a coding game that challenges players first to deduce a hidden problem from clues presented as unit tests and then to write a program to solve it. The game has been enormously successful, attracting more than 150,000 players from around the world and achieving amazing stickiness—99 percent of players return to the game within a week.

Friday, Jul 17, 2015

Monday, Jul 20, 2015

ARTICLE: Companies and governments increasingly rely on ‘big data’ to operate efficiently and competitively. Analytics and security must keep pace. What research underpins the latest big data-enabled advances?

Monday, Feb 22, 2016

Tuesday, Mar 8, 2016

ARTICLE: There’s one area where most people don’t think about privacy too much, and that’s at work. And that’s because this issue has been settled for a while. When using the web, email, or other services at work, there really isn’t much privacy, especially from the IT workers tasked to support and protect these business systems.

Monday, May 2, 2016

Wednesday, Jun 1, 2016

ARTICLE: Today’s busy professionals rarely sit at a desk for eight hours. Work is conducted in cafes, while waiting at the airport, or before leaving the house for the day. Mobile devices have freed business leaders to travel across the country and even to the other side of the globe. However, for entrepreneurs who don’t have a bookkeeping team back home, processing incoming and outgoing invoices in a timely manner can be challenging.

Sunday, Sep 18, 2016

ARTICLE: IEEE Computer Society Rockstars of Cybersecurity: Threats and Counter Measures Symposium September 13, 2016, Seattle,Washington Speaker Steven Bay Presents "Edward Snowden and Defending Against the Insider Threat" Steven Bay was Edward Snowden's boss. This is his personal account of how Edward Snowden was hired, behaved, how he got access to files and suggestion on how you can protect your company or organization.

Wednesday, Oct 12, 2016

ARTICLE: Protect your organization from hackers by learning to think like them. Now, for the first time, NotSoSecure has joined forces with IEEE Computer Society to create the first e-learning courses with The Art of Hacking certification course. You and your staff can take these courses where you are and at your own pace, getting hands-on, real-world training that you can put to work immediately.

Tuesday, Nov 1, 2016

ARTICLE: Today’s virtual (credit) cards are optimizing safety, allowing for easier employee travel reimbursement, and helping everyone avoid credit card fraud. You can set a limit, an expiration date, and trust that the virtual credit card number is unique from any physical credit cards. Yes, you can only use them for online purchases, but swiping cards is usually reserved for smaller purchases anyway. Virtual cards are rapidly changing how we think of payment processing, but many experts agree virtual cards are really a gateway and transition into virtual card payments of the future.

Monday, Nov 7, 2016

ARTICLE: Today, smart homes are considered to be the pinnacle of security, but are these new devices causing more harm than good? Though we may think we’re protecting our homes, many people are inadvertently creating new avenues for cyber criminals to enter. These new systems are full of gaps, but unlike with traditional fences and locks, we often can’t see the spaces where criminals are getting through, making them that much harder to thwart.

Wednesday, Nov 16, 2016

ARTICLE: ast week’s U.S. Presidential election certainly had the eyes of the world looking on. Analysts had plenty to say about the election, but the discussion was geared mostly toward cybersecurity and data.

Wednesday, Dec 7, 2016

ARTICLE: The 2016 U.S. presidential election and President-elect Trump continue to make headlines this week, particularly when it comes to security. You can read about them, along with other news in the Security & Privacy section: Cybersecurity in President Trump’s America: The first 100 days | Cloud Security Allicance - Mon, 28 Nov 2016 |Katie Lewin

Tuesday, Dec 20, 2016

ARTICLE: College campuses aren’t inherently more dangerous than other areas of the country, but with so many young people packed in one place, security is a natural concern. Campus shootings and attacks, rape culture, and other high-profile incidents are putting a spotlight on the importance of campus security, and colleges across the country are looking to new forms of technology to help address student and parent worries.

Wednesday, Dec 21, 2016

ARTICLE: Dark Web, Deep Web, Deepnet, Invisible Web, Hidden Web, Dark Internet. What’s the average computer user to know? You can start by understanding there are dark places and dark minds out there, criminals who would hack into your internet devices and steal or corrupt your information. It’s why all email should be encrypted.

Tuesday, Feb 21, 2017

ARTICLE: Cybersecurity has come a long way over the decades, but hackers and cybersecurity experts are constantly trying to one-up each other in terms of technological sophistication and preparedness. Every time we take a major step forward in terms of reliable security, cybercriminals are there to match us.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

ARTICLE: Most people in the United States rely on technology to do their work, exchange messages, and even handle their financial transactions. The fear of being hacked, or having their personal information vulnerable and/or stolen, is prominent and played up by both technology companies and the media.

Wednesday, Sep 27, 2017

BLOG POST: An organization’s critical assets may be exposed due to malicious wifi that can lead to a security breach, or perhaps fall prey to a malware attack. Whatever the size of the company, an enterprise may lose precious data and incur huge expenses to get back on track.

Thursday, Sep 28, 2017

BLOG POST: IoT isn’t inherently more dangerous than any other kind of technology. It doesn’t suffer from inherently inferior security standards or firewalls, but there are a few vulnerabilities that, by the nature of IoT, make devices in its network a potential target.

Wednesday, Oct 4, 2017

BLOG POST: Data breaches don’t have to be massive or heavily publicized to be destructive; in fact, much smaller data breaches can be even more harmful, since it’s harder to spread the information your consumers need to take protective measures.

Tuesday, Nov 14, 2017

BLOG POST: We’re entering the generation of the internet-of-things (IoT), where all our devices and appliances are connected to the cloud, and we can remotely access and control just about anything with our smartphones. But are these “secure” advancements really as secure as they promise?

Tuesday, Nov 14, 2017

BLOG POST: So how is it that major national corporations, with decades of experience and billions of dollars of buying power, can let massive security breaches happen? And more importantly, what can we do, both inside and outside of these companies, to prevent them in the future?

Sunday, Jan 14, 2018

BLOG POST: With the increasing sophistication and availability of medical devices, cybersecurity is becoming an especially important concern for the healthcare industry. But why is it that medical devices are so vulnerable, and should we be doing more to regulate their development and ongoing management?

Wednesday, Jan 31, 2018

BLOG POST: You don’t need a degree in cyber security to see just how serious cyber attacks are for small businesses and ecommerce websites. The volume of attacks continues to rise, and businesses need to take every precaution to stay safe.

Thursday, Feb 22, 2018

BLOG POST: Cybersecurity is a threat for everyone but is especially dangerous for businesses as the penetration of a business’s database could threaten an innumerable amount people’s data. It is very imperative that a business conduct itself in the most secure way possible to avoid a breach of their internal systems.

Monday, May 21, 2018

BLOG POST: In this age, we will see the number of attacks increase dramatically and the proficiency of the attacks increase as well. However, even with this surge, we will still see the expansion of the internet and the access to devices expand dramatically. This means that, more than ever, we must be prepared to defend ourselves against digital attacks. These can come in the form of malware, brute force attacks and everything in between that try to steal our data and create adware problems.

Monday, May 21, 2018

BLOG POST: Cyber security is important -- now more than ever. It is more apparent than ever that technology is gradually taking over every facet of our lives. Whether we are at home or travelling technology has some sort of involvement in our daily routine.

Monday, Aug 13, 2018

BLOG POST: In recent years, the cumulative amount of high profile breaches has made the front page of the newspaper a terrifying read. Almost everyone has heard of the Equifax and Target breaches that leaked millions of people’s data for anyone and everyone to grab for free.

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IEEE Annals of the History of Computing covers computer history with scholarly articles by leading computer scientists and historians, as well as first-hand accounts.

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Computing in Science & Engineering addresses the need for efficient algorithms, system software, and computer architecture to address large computational problems in the hard sciences.